Musk Unveils Plans for "Terafab" — A Chip Factory the Size of a Small City
Elon Musk's Tesla and SpaceX have committed $16.8 billion to break ground on Terafab, a colossal chip factory in Grimes County, Texas, with total costs potentially reaching $119 billion. Musk described the planned facility as "the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far."
The scale is staggering: more than 100 million square feet of manufacturing space is planned for the site, which would make it the equivalent of 15 U.S. Pentagons. The complex is set to exceed the combined size of China's New Century Global Center, the Pentagon, Apple Park, and the Mall of America.
Located in Grimes County, a rural area of about 30,000 people roughly 75 miles northwest of Houston, the plant is designed to be vertically integrated, handling manufacturing, packaging, and testing of advanced logic and memory chips under one roof. The chips will power Tesla's Optimus robots and Cybercab robotaxis, as well as SpaceX's space-based data centers. The project is expected to create at least 3,000 jobs across Grimes and neighboring Brazos County, and Intel has confirmed it will contribute to the effort.
Worth noting: this is on top of Tesla's existing Gigafactory Texas expansion plans and separate from Musk's earlier push to incorporate "Starbase" as an actual city around SpaceX's Boca Chica launch site — so there are two distinct "small city" storylines involving Musk right now if you want me to cover the other one too.